Responding to "In defence of writing" by Havard Skaar, published in issue 43.1 of this journal (April 2009), the present article argues that (1) compared with text production "from scratch," producing texts through copy-and-paste requires a different type of--rather than less--semiotic work, and that (2) digitally produced writing may involve the…

Debates continue in public and in educational policy forums about the "basics" of literacy while many have not recognised that these basics may never be the same again. Rapid changes in digital communication provide facilities for reading and writing to be combined with various and often quite complex aspects of music, photography and film. At the…